My excuses for not buying a drone are disappearing. Here's why...

I have to be honest, I'm a guy who loves the idea of drone technology but, like many, I have been reluctant to buy a drone because I've watched one after another of my friends crash their drones into trees, buildings, rocks and just about anything else that happened to be around. Crashing a drone has never bothered me when I was testing my flying skills on those cheap toy drones that you can pick up for $25 to $50. But crashing a pro-level drone that costs $1,000 or more? -- well, let's just say that I have not wanted to test my skill level with a price tag like that. So I've continued to see my friends fly their drones and sometimes lament their skills when they are not enough to avoid the trees, buildings, rocks -- and even people -- that sometimes get in the way. Throw in the drones I've watched flown into lakes and seas and my sense of economy winces at the thought of throwing away money like that.

Enter the Yuneec Typhoon H: Drones Smart Enough To Avoid Obstacles
CES 2017 showed off many incredible devices and technologies. One of the ones that I found very compelling was the Yuneec Typhoon H, a drone that uses the latest Intel Smart technology to internally map and track its 3D surroundings and avoid obstacles. How cool is that? I doubt that it is going to save you from a powerful gust of wind that throws your drone into an obstacle that is simply too close to avoid, but short of that I think my reasons for delaying my own entry into the world of drone cinematography are disappearing.

Intel's RealSense™ Technology is quite remarkable and is sure to silence some of us who have chosen to wait in our timidity, as we watch our friends wonder how to pull their drone down from a tall tree or rock ledge that only birds should visit.

CES 2017 was quite an event this year and the Yuneec Typhoon H is one of the tools that I took notice of that have elevated drones to a level that the excuses for not using one, are quickly disappearing.

The Yuneec machines are nice and the Typhoon is one of their better ones, it has a nice "Follow" function and I dig the 360 degree gimbal (and the price is great for what you get). The DJI Phantom 4 Pro just came out and has some pretty amazing new features (shoots 4K at 60FPS, bigger sensor, 2 more obstacle avoidance sensors than the P4...).

It's kind of amazing how quickly the technology is advancing. There are lots of options out there now.

Flying them is super easy (and REALLY fun!) and the footage you can get is ridiculous. We sell only stock footage shot from drones and we get contributors all over the world shooting from as wide a range as GoPros to REDs and Alexas.

If you're thinking about flying commercially there's a few hoops to jump through with the FAA, but even a hobbyist can still make some mailbox money with us. And we're getting together some great flying tutorials and drills to help new operators fly safely (and not crash, regardless of gusts of winds!).

If you have any specific questions about certain drones, we've seen them all and can probably give you some guidance.

It has probably put a damper on actual helo-based photography, though the market space does not overlap perfectly.

As great as these are, they can be just as over-used and mis-used as sliders, jibs,3-D, etc. were when they became affordable to a mass-enthusiast base. Where they will improve is in POV flight that tells a unique story in a unique way that's *better* than using conventional photography.

One of the applications I hope gains usage is using these to fly around old buildings and points of interest, capturing high-rez 3-d scans and texture maps, so we can preserve historic sites and structures around the world, protecting them against acts of nature as well as acts of senseless terror and violence against entire cultures. I wish we'd had this tech and employed it a decade ago, when razing ancient monuments started to become a "thing".

Everything gets overused when it first appears but cools down and quickly finds stasis. I remember when the new plug-ins for After Effects were coming out and suddenly everything looked like that and you knew tons more would soon be coming. I see lots of drone shots today but I don't mind it as much as the ubiquity of those horrid After Effects cartoony but creepy animations that were around a few years back. And I've actually seen some really brilliant stuff done with drones -- not so for those A Scanner Darkly-looking things. 😝

I remember some of the 2D-to-3D conversion programs that existed a decade or so ago that Adobe ended up buying and EOLing. I expect some of that code may be showing up again, soon. One can hope.

Thanks for the chat, Mark.

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.